June 2018 Archives

Shutting down ICE

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Don Surber offers a good look at why the Democrats want to shut down ICE and what ICE actually does. From Don's website:

Why Democrats want to abolish ICE
To answer the question of why Democrats want to shutter the agency, look at what ICE does.

"LAREDO, Texas – Special agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) on Tuesday led an enforcement action that resulted in seizing 21 rifles, 962 rounds of ammunition, ammunition magazines, belt-fed magazines, ballistic plates, armor carriers and ghillie (camouflage) suits," ICE reported on June 21.

So ICE stops the sale of illicit drugs and illegal guns.

Much more at the site - Don's stories come with links to corborating data. He closes with this:

This is just some of what the agency has does.

Let us review. By calling for the abolition of ICE, Democrats support 1. drugs and gun running, 2. money laundering, 3. rapists, 4. human rights violators, 5. terrorism, 6. the mutilation of women, 7. human trafficking, and 8. child porn.

Considering how much crime there is in the cities Democrats run, I am not surprised.

Pretty much sums it up.

Stunt doubles

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Walt Disney is working on autonomous robot stunt doubles for movie making. Here is a 40 second brag reel:

Very cool and these are just the 1.0 versions...

Back home

Wonderful time was had by all. Good food, good people.

Back home in Seattle - tired so probably an early bedtime.

Off to a different island

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We are taking the ferry to Whidbey island for the day - visit with some friends. Minimal posting.

From our National Security Agency:

NSA Reports Data Deletion
Consistent with NSA’s core values of respect for the law, accountability, integrity, and transparency we are making public notice that on May 23, 2018, NSA began deleting all call detail records (CDRs) acquired since 2015 under Title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)

The Government relies on Title V of FISA to obtain CDRs, which do not include the content of any calls. In accordance with this law, the Government obtains these CDRs, following a specific court-authorized process.

NSA is deleting the CDRs because several months ago NSA analysts noted technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunications service providers. These irregularities also resulted in the production to NSA of some CDRs that NSA was not authorized to receive. Because it was infeasible to identify and isolate properly produced data, NSA concluded that it should not use any of the CDRs. Consequently, NSA, in consultation with the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, decided that the appropriate course of action was to delete all CDRs. NSA notified the Congressional Oversight Committees, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and the Department of Justice of this decision. The Department of Justice, in turn, notified the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The root cause of the problem has since been addressed for future CDR acquisitions, and NSA has reviewed and revalidated its intelligence reporting to ensure that the reports were based on properly received CDRs.

Destroying evidense before the FISA abuses are investigated? And that line about: "NSA analysts noted technical irregularities in some data received from telecommunications service providers". Are these providers still collecting the data and just not handing it over to the NSA - no mention. Do the tellecommunications service providers still retain the data that the NSA is deleting.

The timing is definitley odd on this one...

One possible reason - what if the so-called Russian Collusion probe went to the Supreme Court. Would Justice Kennedy have recused himself? From Business Insider:

Trump's business career is more connected to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy than we ever knew
The son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was leading a real-estate division of Deutsche Bank as it gave President Donald Trump over $1 billion in loans to finance his real-estate projects when other banks wouldn't, The New York Times reported Thursday.

No mention of anything wrong or bad business practices but a curious connection.

Turns out there is a back door to the Office email system - from Cyber Security Blog:

Exposing the Secret Office 365 Forensics Tool
An ethical crisis in the digital forensics industry came to a head last week with the release of new details on Microsoft’s undocumented “Activities” API. A previously unknown trove of access and activity logs held by Microsoft allows investigators to track Office 365 mailbox activity in minute detail. Following a long period of mystery and rumors about the existence of such a tool, the details finally emerged, thanks to a video by Anonymous and follow-up research by CrowdStrike.

Now, investigators have access to a stockpile of granular activity data going back six months—even if audit logging was not enabled. For victims of Business Email Compromise (BEC), this is huge news, because investigators are now far more likely to be able to “rule out” unauthorized access to specific emails and attachments.

The secret tool provides evidence that could have saved hundreds—if not thousands—of companies from having to declare a data breach. It is very likely that small businesses were disproportionately affected, since they lack the budget to employ forensics firms and to utilize Office 365 subscriptions that support audit logging.

Until now, this level of granularity was thought not to exist. Turns out, however, that it did, and those who were in the know kept this knowledge a secret.

Much more at the site - as they say:  ...developing...

In Seattle for a few days

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Birthday dinner tonight, friday meeting with friends and then T & I visit with some people on Whidbey Island Saturday.

No posting tonight.

This President is incredible - talk about leadership. From Reuters:

First Trump-Putin summit has Cold War backdrop, U.S. allies nervous
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet for their first summit on July 16 in Helsinki, a venue famed for its Cold War diplomacy, with nervous U.S. allies in Europe and Russia skeptics looking on.

The Kremlin and the White House simultaneously announced the place and date a day after reaching agreement for the two leaders to meet following a visit to Moscow by U.S. national security adviser John Bolton.Trump will meet Putin after attending a July 11-12 summit of NATO leaders and a visit to Britain. The date will give Putin a chance to attend the July 15 closing ceremony of the soccer World Cup hosted by Russia.

The two leaders have met twice before on the sidelines of international gatherings and spoken at least eight times by phone. They have also made positive comments about each other now and then with Putin lauding Trump’s handling of the U.S. economy.

“The two leaders will discuss relations between the United States and Russia and a range of national security issues,” the White House said in a statement similar to one released by the Kremlin.

I would love to be a fly on that wall - two alpha males dealing with some serious issues. The outcome will be interesting to see.

Crap - another shooting

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From the Capital Gazette:

Five dead, others 'gravely injured' in shooting at Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis
At least five people were killed and several others were “gravely injured” in a shooting Thursday afternoon at the Capital Gazette in Anne Arundel County, authorities said.

A shooter is in custody, police said. Police would not name the suspect or say what type of weapon was used.

Anne Arundel County Police initially confirmed about 3:15 p.m. that they were responding to an “active shooter” at 888 Bestgate Road, where the newspaper’s offices are located. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also responded to the scene.

Still too early for any details but it is interesting that the police were able to respond in one minute and that the Feds responded too - BATFE and FBI. More as we hear it.

I can not imagine anyone better suited for the position. From Bloomberg:

Trump Weighing Senator Mike Lee for Supreme Court Vacancy, Sources Say
President Donald Trump has asked advisers their opinions about nominating Utah Senator Mike Lee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It remains early in the selection process for a nomination that will be a crucial part of Trump’s legacy, choosing a justice who is likely to serve on the court for decades and cement its ideological balance to the most conservative in generations.

Lee is 47 years old so he would be on the bench for 30-40 years if appointed. His track record in the Senate is spotless.

Got nothing

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Up on the island, heading to Seattle tomorrow.

Nothing catches my eye.

Heh - from Steven's twitter account:

Laser pointers - dangerous

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A cautionary tale. Laser pointers are NOT toys. From the New England Journal of Medicine:

Macular Hole from a Laser Pointer

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A 9-year-old boy was brought by his parents to our ophthalmology clinic for evaluation of decreased vision in his left eye. Visual acuity in the left eye was 20/100, as compared with 20/20 in the right eye. Funduscopic examination of the left eye revealed a large macular hole with a hypopigmented atrophic area inferiorly (Panel A). Optical coherence tomography confirmed the full-thickness macular hole. Fundus autofluorescence imaging highlighted two spots inferior to the macular hole that corresponded to additional areas of injury (Panel B). The child reported playing with a green laser pointer and repeatedly gazing into the laser beam. Although many national health agencies have warned about the potential eye hazards associated with handheld laser pointers, and the sale of devices with greater than 1 mW of power is restricted in many areas, more powerful laser devices remain accessible, especially through the Internet. Because of the large diameter of the macular hole and the accompanying atrophy in this patient, we favored conservative management rather than surgery. The patient’s vision has remained unchanged during 18 months of follow-up.

Emphasis mine - the damage is permanent. Barring some new development in medicine, the kid is going to have bad vision for the rest of his life. I own some lasers including one very powerful one but they are not used as toys.

Pitch perfect message:

Interesting news - Supreme Court

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And President Trump gets to pick Justice #2 - from Associated Press:

Justice Kennedy retiring; Trump gets 2nd Supreme Court pick
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement Wednesday, giving President Donald Trump the chance to cement conservative control of the high court.

The 81-year-old Kennedy said in a statement he is stepping down after more than 30 years on the court. A Republican appointee, he has held the key vote on such high-profile issues as abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, guns, campaign finance and voting rights.

Kennedy said he has informed his colleagues and Trump of his plans, and that his retirement will take effect at the end of July.

Trump praised Kennedy as a man of “tremendous vision” and said his search for a new justice would begin “immediately.”

Without Kennedy, the court will be split between four liberal justices who were appointed by Democratic presidents and four conservatives who were named by Republicans. Trump’s nominee is likely to give the conservatives a solid majority and will face a Senate process in which Republicans hold the slimmest majority, but Democrats can’t delay confirmation.

I wonder if Justice Ginsberg will hold on for the next six years - she is 85. I wish Justice Kennedy the best.

Flashback

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What if Microsoft did phones 20 years ago:

NOT - from Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch Obtains IRS Documents Revealing McCain’s Subcommittee Staff Director Urged IRS to Engage in “Financially Ruinous” Targeting
Judicial Watch today released newly obtained internal IRS documents, including material revealing that Sen. John McCain’s former staff director and chief counsel on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee, Henry Kerner, urged top IRS officials, including then-director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner, to “audit so many that it becomes financially ruinous.”  Kerner was appointed by President Trump as Special Counsel for the United States Office of Special Counsel.

The explosive exchange was contained in notes taken by IRS employees at an April 30, 2013, meeting between Kerner, Lerner, and other high-ranking IRS officials. Just ten days following the meeting, former IRS director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner admitted that the IRS had a policy of improperly and deliberately delaying applications for tax-exempt status from conservative non-profit groups.

Much more at the site. The rot starts at the top.

Liberal tolerance

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Great news from the Department of Justice:

Justice Department Settles Claims Against Landscaping Company for Discriminating Against U.S. Workers
The Justice Department today reached a settlement agreement with Triple H Services LLC, (Triple H), a landscaping company based in Newland, North Carolina, that conducts business in Virginia and four other states. The agreement resolves the Department’s investigation into whether Triple H discriminated against qualified and available U.S. workers based on their citizenship status by preferring to hire temporary workers with H-2B visas, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The Department’s investigation found that although Triple H went through the motions of advertising over 450 landscape laborer vacancies in five states, it did so in a manner that misled U.S. workers about the available positions and prevented or deterred some from applying. The Department found that Triple H did not consider several qualified U.S. workers who applied for positions in Virginia during the recruitment period, and instead hired H-2B visa workers. In several states where jobs were available, the Department found that Triple H prematurely closed the online job application process for U.S. worker applicants, filled positions with H-2B visa workers without first advertising the jobs to U.S. workers in the relevant locations, or advertised vacancies in a manner that did not make the postings visible to job seekers using state workforce agency online services.

The Department concluded that in taking these actions, Triple H effectively denied U.S. workers access to jobs based on its preference for hiring temporary H-2B visa workers to fill the positions. Refusing to consider or hire qualified and available U.S. workers based on their citizenship status violates the INA’s anti-discrimination provision, regardless of whether an employer has complied with other rules governing the use of temporary employment-based visa programs.

Under the settlement, Triple H must establish a back pay fund, with a cap of $85,000, to compensate certain individuals who were harmed by its practices. The agreement also requires Triple H to pay $15,600 in civil penalties, engage in enhanced recruitment activities to attract U.S. workers, and be subject to Departmental monitoring for a three-year period.

Good - make it hurt. We have a lot of our own people looking for work in the US to start handing jobs out to people from other nations.

Thinking twice - Ramen

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Quick and tasty but... From The Washington Post:

All those instant noodles you eat may put you at risk for heart problems
It’s convenient, cheap and best served hot, but how healthful is it?

The instant noodles commonly known as ramen — a staple food for college kids and other young adults, as well as for people in certain cultures — may increase people’s risk of metabolic changes linked to heart disease and stroke, new research finds.

In the study, women in South Korea who consumed more of the precooked blocks of dried noodles than others were more likely to have the condition known as metabolic syndrome, regardless of what else they ate or how much they exercised, the researchers found. People with metabolic syndrome may have high blood pressure or high blood sugar levels, and they face an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

“Although instant noodle is a convenient and delicious food, there could be an increased risk for metabolic syndrome given [the food’s] high sodium, unhealthy saturated fat and glycemic loads,” said Hyun Shin, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the study.

They looked at over 10,000 people ages 19 through 64 - a good statistical sample size. Everything in moderation...

From the Houston, Texas Chronicle:

Fentanyl-laced flyers placed on Harris County sheriff’s fleet vehicles in east Houston
A sergeant with the Harris County Sheriff's Office was hospitalized Tuesday after coming in contact with a fentanyl-laced paper flyer, authorities said.

The flyer was one of several placed on nearly a dozen sheriff's office vehicles at HCSO's recruitment and criminal investigations center at 601 Lockwood Drive in east Houston, according to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.

A bit more:

The sergeant came across the flyer on her windshield Tuesday afternoon as she left work, Gonzalez said. She initially did not think anything of it but soon started to feel light-headed and showed other fentanyl-related symptoms.

She was rushed to the hospital and is expected to survive as authorities investigate the flyers' origination. She was released around 4:30 p.m., authorities said.

"She caught it quickly," Gonzalez said. "We do know from our experience with fentanyl is that it can be very deadly. It's 100 times more potent than morphine."

And the flyers:

The flyers promoted the organization Targeted Individuals, an organization which believes that the "Deep State" targets certain individuals.

The group believes the FBI and CIA purposefully inflict mental, physical and emotional stress on enemies of the "Deep State," in part, by shooting microwave technology at their heads in order to cause brain damage, according to the group's website.

The organization could not be reached for comment.

Pure conspiracy theory stuff - get your AFDB's ready.

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Super slow motion

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From video card maker NVIDIA:

Transforming Standard Video Into Slow Motion with AI
Researchers from NVIDIA developed a deep learning-based system that can produce high-quality slow-motion videos from a 30-frame-per-second video, outperforming various state-of-the-art methods that aim to do the same. The researchers will present their work at the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Salt Lake City, Utah this week.

“There are many memorable moments in your life that you might want to record with a camera in slow-motion because they are hard to see clearly with your eyes: the first time a baby walks, a difficult skateboard trick, a dog catching a ball,” the researchers wrote in the research paper. “While it is possible to take 240-frame-per-second videos with a cell phone, recording everything at high frame rates is impractical, as it requires large memories and is power-intensive for mobile devices,” the team explained.

With this new research, users can slow down their recordings after taking them.

Very interested in this technology. I can shoot at 240 fps which is an 8X slow down but cameras that can work at higher framerates are simply too expensive for me. The Edgertronic SC2X does 1,910 fps @ 1920 x 1088 but costs $15K - the Fantoms start in the $100K range. This is a very interesting work-around.

40 minutes on the phone

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But I got blinkey lights on the modem and sweet sweet broadband.

Baby steps

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Signs of change - Kim has stopped flying missiles over Japan and Guam, over 500 of our dead soldiers remains have been returned, they have announced the location of several hertofore secret nuclear labs and production facilities and now this - from FOX News:

In sign of detente, North Korea skips annual anti-US rally
In another sign of detente following the summit between leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, North Korea has decided to skip one of the most symbolic and politically charged events of its calendar: the annual "anti-U.S. imperialism" rally marking the start of the Korean War.

Fist-pumping, flag-waving and slogan-shouting masses of Pyongyang residents normally assemble each year for the rally to kick off a month of anti-U.S., Korean War-focused events designed to strengthen nationalism and unity. It all culminates on July 27, which North Korea celebrates as a national holiday called the day of "Victory in the Fatherland Liberation War."

Last year's event was held on Kim Il Sung Square with a reported 100,000 people attending. North Korea even issued special anti-U.S. postage stamps.

Officials had no on-the-record comment on the decision not to hold the event this year. But Associated Press staff in the North Korean capital confirmed Monday it would not be held.

Very cool - a big thanks to President Trump for pulling this off.

Only if it coincides with the agenda they are being fed by their minders. Some headlines with links:

They have nothing to debate on so they resort to violence and screeching. Pretty pathetic actually...

Fun to watch from this corner of the republic - so glad I do not live on the East coast anymore.

The joys of country living

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Pulled in to the farm a couple of hours ago. Went to check email and no internet. My last email came in at 12:49 this afternoon so this is a recent development. At the store now taking care of a couple things and will head back to the farm and place a service call.

Had a wonderful thunderstorm on Camano last night - was looking at it across the water as the front headed North.

Heading back to the farm. Unless Frontier is able to work some magic on their end, I will be without internet, no YouTube and no Roku Television. I might actually get some work done :P

Mark gets it

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Interesting turn - part two

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Had no idea these meetings were taking place - from Breitbart:

Jared Kushner: U.S. Ready to Work with Abbas
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner slammed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for issuing a blanket rejection of the U.S. peace proposal before seeing it, but added that the U.S. is willing to work with the Palestinian leader, in a rare interview published Sunday.

The interview, published in the Arabic-language Al-Quds newspaper, comes as Kushner and Trump’s Mideast peace envoy Jason Greenblatt wrap up a trip to the region to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as well as the White House peace proposal. The American officials held meetings in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt, but were shunned by the Palestinian leadership itself.

Kushner said he is “ready to work with [Palestinian Authority] President Abbas, if he wishes.”

Abbas' power comes from his alliance with Hamas. He doesn't want peace because he will lose his position of power. Like any tyrant, he has nothing real to offer the "palestinian" people and if they get the chance to have a free election, his whole party will be swept from office and consigned to the dustbin of history. Do not forget that Abbas' predecessor, Yasser Arafat, was a KGB plant to destabilize that area of the world. Russia was worried that Israel would dominate the Middle East and wanted to curtail their power. Arafat spent 9 years in Moscow training.

If they do not stop the terrorism, the cash will stop flowing. Talk about getting their attention - from i24 - International:

EXCLUSIVE: US freezes Palestinian aid budget
The United States has quietly frozen its aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) pending review, i24NEWS has learned. The move comes two months after Congress passed the Taylor Force Act, which aimed to force the PA to terminate its “pay-for-slay” policies of paying stipends to convicted terrorists in Israeli jails and to the families of dead terrorists.

The act orders that US assistance to the West Bank and Gaza “that directly benefits the PA” be suspended unless the Secretary of State certifies that the Palestinian Authority has met four conditions: terminating these payments to terrorists, revoking laws authorizing this compensation, taking “credible steps” to end Palestinian terrorism, and “publicly condemning” and investigating such acts of violence.

The PA is run by Hamas which is a terrorist organization. Terrorist organizations need to be defunded. End of story.

Long and fun day

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Went to the local field day this morning - this was the fifth field day I have attended and it was a lot of fun. Some good people here on our little island.

I knew there was a car show later today but I did not realize just how big it was - over 500 vehicles!  Some photos:

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Chopped and lowered - gorgeous work!

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My first car ever was a Jeep CJ5 - loved it! This CJ5 has had some interesting work done on it...

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Gorgeous old Mercedes from the 1930's (forget the model and exact year). Talk about feeling lust in my heart.

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Cute little build - someone had some fun with this.

And finally - these two:

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Shot back to back - about a mile of gorgeous cars and several thousand people of all stripes admiring them.

A new gun design from Ruger

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On the island

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Our local amateur radio club is participating in the world-wide Field Day today and tomorrow. Planning to show up there tomorrow morning. It ends at 11:00AM local time so I will hang out for a while helping people to pack up. Done a bunch of these and there always seems to be a shortage of help when it shuts down...

There is also a local car show - The Twin City Idlers. Should be fun to check out. They had quite the parade this evening.

Great analysis from Don Surber:

Sanctuary city opposes housing illegal aliens
Concord in Contra Costa County, California, is a sanctuary city.

"There are 2.3-2.6 million Californians who are undocumented. The concept of a sanctuary city goes back thousands of years when cities in the Old Testament agreed to be a place for those seeking safety," the county says.

President Trump said good.

We'll re-open a shuttered Navy base in the city and house 47,000 illegal aliens there.

Over the dead body of County Supervisor John Gioia.

"This is crazy. We're going to fight it. We're not going to let this happen," Gioia said.

Plenty of politicians in the Bay Area are up in arms over importing illegal aliens into their sanctuary city.

"This is not a solution, but evil policy. It reminds me of WWII, Japanese put in internment camps. We don't want that, Democratic Congressman Mark DeSaulnier told KGO.

Concord Mayor Edi Birsan told the Mercury News, "This is so bizarre and a topic that is always in such flux. At first I thought it was Fake News."

The kneejerk opposition to illegal aliens is hilariously hypocritical. City spokeswoman Jennifer Ortega told the newspaper, "Last September, the City of Concord passed a resolution affirming (its) commitment to being a welcoming, inclusive, tolerant and supportive community for all. We do not feel that a detention center within city limits represents those values."

The good citizens of Concord are missing out on the one thing that this will bring them. Jobs. Feeding, housing and supporting 47,000 people is going to take an army of workers with all sorts of skills. Liberals do not think things though to their logical end.

From Bloomberg comes this horrible tale:

Kentucky Bourbon Warehouse Collapses, Spilling 9,000 Barrels of Whiskey
Thousands of whiskey barrels crashed into a massive heap Friday when a large section of a decades-old storage warehouse collapsed at a distillery in the heart of Kentucky bourbon country.

The damaged warehouse at the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown held about 18,000 barrels, and it appeared that up to half the barrels inside were affected, the distillery's owner said.

Thank God no injuries - the photo brings a tear to my eye:

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Classical allusion in the post title.

An interesting shift - North Korea

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From the Beeb:

North Korean propaganda changes its tune
Banners and posters displayed across the capital and other towns have typically featured the US as a brutal imperialist aggressor and South Korea or Japan as Washington's willing allies.

But visitors to the country say they've seen those posters replaced by propaganda pushing economic progress and the inter-Korean rapprochement.

Leading newspapers in the tightly controlled country have also seen a shift in tone, a sign the country is starting to reflect its recent diplomatic thaw to the people.

Wonderful news - 68 years of war finally coming to a close. Lots of propaganda posters at the site but older and current. Quite the shift!

Another domino falls - Peter Strzok

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From Zero Hedge:

Strzok Subpoenaed, Must Appear Before Congress In Five Days
FBI special agent Peter Strzok is having a very bad June. After being  physically escorted out of his FBI office last Friday and losing his security clearance this week, per Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the anti-Trump "lovebird" has been subpoenaed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-IA).

A bit more about the case:

Strzok, was in charge of both FBI investigations into both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, harbored extreme animus towards the latter - as revealed within a batch of 50,00 text messages he sent to his mistress - FBI attorney Lisa Page, including one in which Strzok says he will stop Trump from becoming President.

That was in the Inspector General's report - makes for amazing reading. Rot at the top of the FBI. The reason you are hearing about all the poor chillun right now is the liberal media need something to deflect from the IG Report - keep it out of the public discourse.

Remember:

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

Hypocrite - David Hogg

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From The American Mirror:

Anti-gun protester David Hogg — protected by armed guards?
David Hogg is a VIP now.

The 18-year-old attended the Parkland, Florida school where a student murdered 17 people in February, then made himself famous with relentless calls for gun control in the wake of the tragedy.

Now he’s got a book deal, and publicists — and armed guards.

Sean Di Somma snapped some pictures of Hogg strolling the streets of New York City recently with his new entourage in tow.

Hogg is just as much a media whore as Stormy. A convenient tool who will be thrown away as soon as their usefulness to the deep state is over.

Heavy rains in the Black Rock River

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Inexorable is the word that comes to mind.

Force of nature.

From the Washington State Department of Transportation:

Road to Artist Point: Open for the season
Thursday, June 21, 2018 - 09:50

 The summer hiking season is kicking off near Mount Baker. Crews opened the gate to the seasonal section of State Route 542 at 12 p.m. on Thursday, June 21.

Three weeks of hard work plus a few days of blue skies and soft snow helped Washington State Department of Transportation maintenance crews clear the 2.7-mile seasonally closed section of State Route 542, known as the road to Artist Point, faster than usual.

This is a huge tourist draw. Businesses up here make the majority of their money in the summer. The ski season is nice but it is mostly daytrippers coming up in the morning and heading for home at 3:00PM cold and tired with no desire to stop for groceries or a beer. Summer, we get the people who come up for a week and hike, camp, fish, boat, etc...

Our Southern Border - three stories

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Three great stories today courtesy of Andrew Wilkow:

From the NYC ABC affiliate:

Mayor de Blasio turned away from detained migrant children's facility in Texas
Mayor Bill de Blasio and mayors from more than a dozen other U.S. cities gathered near a holding facility for migrant children on the Texas border with Mexico -- and were turned away from going inside.

The New York City mayor and his counterparts from Los Angeles, Seattle and beyond pilgrimaged to the Tornillo facility Thursday to push for the immediate reunification of migrant children with their families, even as President Donald Trump ordered a halt to the policy separating them.

Heh - they tried to do a little virtue signalling and got blocked.

From Newsweek:

CANADA ALSO DETAINS IMMIGRANT CHILDREN AND SEPARATES THEM FROM THEIR FATHERS
The United States has been the subject of intense international scrutiny for its immigration practice that has resulted in immigrant families being separated at the border. But it appears that neighboring Canada has done the same

This is not an immigration issue. If a parent is pulled over for driving erratically and there are kids in the car, these children will be put into care if that parent fails a field sobriety test. Tell me one jurisdiction where a child will not be placed into protective custody if an accompyning parent is arrested. Remember, these adults are breaking the law by coming across the border. They are cutting in line - trying to come in ahead of all the people trying to immigrate here legally. If you seee someone trying to cut in line do you get pissed?

And, from Gateway Pundit:

Stormy Daniels Says She’s Headed to the Border Next Week As Soon as She Figures Her Best Course of Action
Porn actress and Trump antagonist Stormy Daniels says she is heading to the border to help with the migrant crisis–but in a week as soon as she can figure out her best course of action. Daniels’ grandstanding Trump-hating attorney Michael Avenatti already jumped on the border crisis and is representing detained migrants and also claims to represent ICE whistleblowers. But first Daniels had to hang out in Boston with psycho Trump-hater Kathy Griffin where they posed togther flipping the bird at President Trump.

Well, she started her career as a whore - now she is just a media whore. In her 40's and seeing the career slipping away. Always classy!

Reorganizing the Federal Government

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Great idea - he actually uses the word accountable:

10,000,000 patents

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Wow!  Talk about being a productive nation. The US Patent Office just issued it's 10 millionth patent three days ago.

Here is a link to the patent: Coherent LADAR using intra-pixel quadrature detection

Here is a link to the US Patent Office's commemoration page: 10 million patents

That is it for the evening

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Watching some TV and going to bed early. Busy day tomorrow.

On the island for a night

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Had to bring some things down here so making a night of it. Internet was out at the farm so headed down about 3:00PM.

Mow the lawn tomorrow morning and then drive back up. Love it down here.

Aw crap - RIP Koko

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From The Gorilla Foundation:

The Gorilla Foundation is sad to announce the passing of our beloved Koko
Koko — the gorilla known for her extraordinary mastery of sign language, and as the primary ambassador for her endangered species — passed away yesterday morning in her sleep at the age of 46.

Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for interspecies communication and empathy. She was beloved and will be deeply missed.

Koko, a western lowland gorilla, was born Hanabi-ko (Japanese for “Fireworks Child”) on July 4, 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo. Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson began working with Koko the next year, famously teaching her sign language. Dr. Patterson and Dr. Ronald Cohn moved Koko and the project to Stanford in 1974 and went on to establish The Gorilla Foundation. While at Stanford the project expanded to include a second western lowland gorilla, Michael. In 1979 Koko and The Gorilla Foundation moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains where Ndume joined them as a fellow ambassador for their species.

Koko’s capacity for language and empathy has opened the minds and hearts of millions. She has been featured in multiple documentaries and appeared on the cover of National Geographic twice. The first cover, in October of 1978, featured a photograph Koko had taken of herself in a mirror. The second issue, in January of 1985, included the story of Koko and her kitten, All Ball. Following the article, the book Koko’s Kitten was published and continues to be used in elementary schools worldwide. Her impact has been profound and what she has taught us about the emotional capacity of gorillas and their cognitive abilities will continue to shape the world.

The foundation will continue to honor Koko’s legacy and advance our mission with ongoing projects including conservation efforts in Africa, the great ape sanctuary on Maui, and a sign language application featuring Koko for the benefit of both gorillas and children.

I remember reading about her and was intrigued at her abilities with sign language. Animals may not be able to articulate speech but they certainly have thoughts and emotions. Normal lifespan is 35-40 in the wild so she had a good run.

Oh this is wonderful

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True leadership:

Attention whore - Michael Avenatti

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Talk about jumping the shark a long long time ago. From My San Antonio:

Celebrity lawyer takes cases of 50 immigrant women, children separated at the border
Porn star Stormy Daniel’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, made an impromptu appearance at the Catholic Charities RGV’s respite center Tuesday afternoon.

That’s because Avenatti, in addition to representing the woman who is suing President Donald Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen, is now also representing about 50 immigrant women and children who were separated from each other after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

What a putz. He is not doing it for the children. He is doing it for his own ego and publicity. Anything to keep his name in the media. When is the book coming out Michael?

Still pissed at him for taking over and subsequently gutting Tully's Coffee - I liked their coffee.

Nelson is not a working dog

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Just wants to play

Too cute!

Interesting project in New York

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From the New York City FOX affiliate:

Fixing a massive NYC plumbing leak, 55 stories underground
New York City is in the midst of a plumbing repair job of monumental proportions.

Hard-hat workers are toiling deep underground, 55 stories beneath the Hudson River, to eliminate gushing leaks in an aging tunnel that carries half the city's water supply over 85 miles from Catskill Mountain reservoirs. Using a cylindrical, space-rocket-size borer, they are carving through solid rock to create a 2.5-mile bypass tunnel around the worst of the leaks.

When they finish the $1 billion tunnel in 2022, the entire Delaware Aqueduct will be shut down for months to prepare for the diversion. And if they do it right, New Yorkers turning on their faucets will never even notice.

"It's really the largest and most complex water tunnel repair that the city of New York has ever done," said Vincent Sapienza, commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Protection. "There's a lot of moving parts that we've been wrestling with for several years now."

Big engineering projects fascinate me a lot. They are losing 18 million gallons of water each day - too big to ignore.

Another day at the farm

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Getting ready to recycle a whole bunch of ferrous metal that I have accumulated through years of blacksmithing and other projects. I was initially thinking of having the recycling place bring out a small dumpster but they no longer do this - their box is 20 feet long and they charge $250 to bring it out. Instead, I will rent a flatbed truck for a day, load it up with the tractor and drive it in the next morning.

Fixing some pulled pork tacos for dinner tonight. Got a bunch frozen and I thaw out a pound every so often - enough for a couple of days and very delicious. Costco has the whole pork butt (actually from the shoulder) and I smoke it, portion it out and freeze it.

Go do nothing somewhere else

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President Trump read the riot act to Republican members of congress yesterday. From DC Whispers:

BREAKING: Trump Just Tore Into Republican Leadership Over Children In Cages Hoax
“You really want to try and win your election in November without me? I don’t think so.”

UPDATE: “I’m following the law as it’s written. If you don’t like the law then Congress needs to change it. It’s simple. Simple. I’m with you but if you don’t like it you need to do something about it…It looks bad. Sure. Really bad. If you want to change that then change the law. DO SOMETHING. You people (Congress) have to change it. That’s how it has to be done.”

UPDATE #2: “We all know what it is. It’s fake. Fake news. CNN…it’s fake. The pictures…that was Obama’s, during his administration, not mine. You can’t let it scare you. That’s what they want. That’s why they do it. This law, you just need to change it if you don’t like it. And that’s the way it is. I’m not here to save you. I’m here to let you know I’ll support you but you have to do something. Or not. But if you don’t do something don’t come crying to me about it okay? Right?”

UPDATE #3: “Why is this coming up now? I mean, it’s so obvious am I right? Mitch knows. The economy, jobs, North Korea, there’s so much great news they had to do the fake news. I’m not saying the pictures aren’t bad. They’re bad. Certainly not good. They make it look bad. You have to do something. You have to work together. It could be such a big, beautiful thing if you did that. The Democrats won’t help. We all know that. They think this is good for them. We’ll see about that. But doing something, working together, isn’t that why you’re here? It should be. And if you don’t do that and November doesn’t work out for you then I’m sorry but you shouldn’t be here. Go do nothing somewhere else. You bring me something (a bill) that makes sense and I’ll sign it. It’s so simple. It should be. But it has to make sense. It has to be good for the American people. This isn’t rocket science folks. It really isn’t. Figure it out.”

Hat tip to Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man for the link. Classic leadership.

Don't you know you never go full retard. From The Boston Globe:

In an about-face, hospital will disperse portraits of past white male luminaries, put the focus on diversity
The employees and students who regularly gather in the Bornstein Amphitheater at Brigham and Women’s Hospital include women, blacks, and Hispanics. The 31 gold-framed portraits of medical luminaries that cover the walls do not.

The portraits are all of men. Thirty are white, and one is Chinese.

On Thursday, the Harvard Medical School teaching hospital plans to remove the paintings of the former department chairs, as part of its broader diversity initiatives.

Many of the paintings have spent decades in the prestigious spot. They hang in a room that hosts a growing array of cultural events, including the hospital’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. Now they’ll be dispersed to department conference rooms and lobbies throughout the hospital.

Good God - these morons are re-writing history. Whitewashing.

The United Nations needs to be kicked out of the USA and the real estate converted into a Trump Tower. It is a scandal-ridden and corrupt body. The founding idea was a very good one but the participants soon found that it was easy to do whatever they wanted. We fund them to the tune of $8 Billion per year and get nothing for our efforts.

Seems like we are finally growing a pair - from Reuters:

U.S. withdraws from U.N. Human Rights Council: U.S. Ambassador Haley
The United States withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday after no other countries “had the courage to join our fight” to reform the “hypocritical and self-serving” body, said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

“In doing so, I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments,” Haley said.

What Reuters did not say is that we are also cutting our funding for the Council. Good!

First here, then here and now this from Zero Hedge:

FBI Agent Strzok Was Escorted Out Of FBI Building
In the aftermath of the publication of the Inspector General's report on FBI abuse, if there was one thing that was made abundantly clear, it was that FBI special agent Peter Strzok - who was in charge of the Clinton email investigation and then probed Trump for "Russian collusion" while texting his lover Lisa Page that "we'll stop" Trump from becoming president -  was acting out of pure, political bias and anger at Clinton's loss. It was certainly not lost on Trump, who made his feelings on the subject abundantly clear on twitter:

    • Comey gave Strozk his marching orders. Mueller is Comey’s best friend. Witch Hunt! (source)
    • “The highest level of bias I’ve ever witnessed in any law enforcement officer.” Trey Gowdy on the FBI’s own, Peter Strzok. Also remember that they all worked for Slippery James Comey and that Comey is best friends with Robert Mueller. A really sick deal, isn’t it? (source)
    • The IG Report totally destroys James Comey and all of his minions including the great lovers, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who started the disgraceful Witch Hunt against so many innocent people. It will go down as a dark and dangerous period in American History! (source)
    • FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who headed the Clinton & Russia investigations, texted to his lover Lisa Page, in the IG Report, that “we’ll stop” candidate Trump from becoming President. Doesn’t get any lower than that! (source)

And while Lisa Page had the wits to quit shortly before the publication of the OIG report, Strzok did not and in fact was still employed at the time of the report's publication last Thursday. But maybe not much longer because as CNN first reportedStrzok was escorted out of the FBI building on Friday, even though he is still technically employed and, as we reported some time ago, he has been stationed in Human Resources since dismissal from Mueller team.

And the story gets better - there is a letter from Strzok's lawyer. Comedy gold!

Water usage - Iceland

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A fun observation from Iceland's The Reykjavík Grapevine:

Household Water Use During Argentina-Iceland Game Looks Like You’d Expect
Capital area utilities company Veitur tracked household water usage during the Argentina-Iceland match, and the results are pretty unsurprising.

According to their data, household water use took an unusually high upwards spike at about 11:00, some two hours before the match, and steadily declined until the match started. At that time, it dropped precipitously.

At halftime, water use spikes back up, just slightly higher than average levels for a typical Saturday, before dropping like a stone again once the match resumes. At the match’s conclusion, water use then returns to normal.

Contrary to popular myth, Iceland’s plumbing system was not overburdened with thousands of simultaneously flushing toilets during any part of this day.

And here is the data:

20180618-iceland.jpg

One more night

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Was going to do a bunch of yard work and then head to the farm.

Temps got to over 90°F this afternoon so I bagged it after about ten minutes and did some stuff in the garage and hung out and read a new (to me) library book. Staying up here another night and will take care of the yard tomorrow morning.

It was hot here but it didn't feel bad unless I was doing something strenuous - sitting in a lounge chair was downright comfortable and the roof vents in the house did their job keeping it nice and cool inside.

I resemble that:

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20180618-browser.jpg

Three headlines

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Caught my eye - each headline is a link to the original story:

The space force is an excellent idea - there is too much inter-agency quibbling over who has jurisdiction. Navy flyers v/s Air Force - so much duplication and waste. The 50 Media Mistakes is a fun read. 

Fake Media indeed!

Rolling up the deep state

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First it was this: Former Senate Intelligence Committee director of security indicted, arrested for lying to FBI about leaks to reporters

Now we have this - from The Daily Caller:

COMEY UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR HANDLING OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION
Former FBI director James Comey is under investigation for mishandling classified information, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz revealed Monday.

He is specifically under investigation for his handling of memos he wrote about interactions with President Trump while FBI director.

“Comey said he did not expect a report on his handling of classified information because, ‘That’s frivolous.’ I don’t happen to think that it is frivolous,” Sen. Chuck Grassley said during a Senate hearing Monday.

This is #2 in a long line of dominoes. Draining the swamp one bad actor at a time.

Three years ago yesterday

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And it just keeps getting better and better and better:

Island blogging

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Had a wonderful Fathers Day dinner - the first of many!

Came back to the island house. It faces due North and one of the minor disappointments was that the sunsets were always beyond a ridgeline. Not today - we had precessed enough for the sunset to be fully visible from the deck. Probably will not last a long time - I am guessing a few weeks. We are too close to the solstice and that marks the Southern journey of our sun. Still, glorious for the few weeks that we have it!

Moved a lot of boxes yesterday and today - back is talking to me and I am self-medicating with a jar or two of red wine.

Says it all:

The photos look like a nice dormitory - from the second article:

The facility is not a “cage.” It is a comfortable facility providing lodging, meals, clothing, medical care, education, recreation, counseling, and other services.

A bit more:

They are also given toiletries and lessons in hygiene — literally how to flush a toilet, brush their teeth, and operate the shower, which some of the children may have never seen in their lives.

And this:

The children receive six hours of education daily, which include lessons in English and physical education. The boys interact with girls who are housed offsite and brought to the shelter during the day to access its services.

They have limited access to telephones to call relatives, both in the U.S. and abroad. They receive therapy, both as individuals and in group sessions. They enjoy field trips to local museums, parks, and the zoo, where they can explore the city beyond the shelter. And they also have social activities, including a recent “prom” for which they dressed up.

Sounds like the democrats have a big nothingburger and that these children are being taken care of very well.

A bunch of democrat lawmakers visited their future voting block. From The Hill:

Dem lawmakers make surprise visit to ICE detention center
Several Democratic lawmakers on Sunday paid a "surprise Father's Day visit" to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in New Jersey, capping off a week of heightened tensions surrounding the issue of migrant family separations.

A bit more:

According to Jeffries, the lawmakers were blocked from entering the facility after meeting initial resistance from ICE staff.

Maloney tweeted that the group was allowed in more than an hour later after "banging on the door" and telling ICE staff and local police that they would not move until they were let in.

"After being made to wait over an hour. After having to deal with local PD. After banging on the door and making it clear that we WILL NOT MOVE until we're allowed in, ICE is finally granting us access to see individuals who have been separated from their families," Maloney tweeted.

The word you are looking for is Showboating

In other news - this from March 11, 2015's issue of The Washington Post:

Mexican kids held for months as punishment for border-crossing
Last spring, as Central American children flooded into Texas in a way he had never seen in his three-decade career, Border Patrol agent Robert Harris decided to experiment.

His intelligence analysts estimated that 78 percent of the guides smuggling other migrants were Mexicans younger than 18 — teenagers often hired or conscripted by drug cartels that knew they would not be prosecuted if caught — and he wanted to attack this loophole.

“Why don’t we remove these juveniles from the smuggling cycle?” Harris, the outgoing commander of the Laredo sector of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, recalled thinking.

Now, as a result of that decision, young Mexicans are being held for months without charge in shelters across the United States, sometimes without their parents’ knowledge. Since the program began in May, 536 juveniles have been held — 248 of whom have been deported to Mexico after an average stay of 75 days, according to Border Patrol statistics. Mexican authorities say some of these repeat border-crossers have spent as much as six months in U.S. custody while they await an appearance before an immigration judge.

And this happened under Obama's watch.

Busy couple of days - 2

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T is on her way into town to unload and I am staging boxes ready for a second or third load. Feels great to get stuff moved out!

Minimal posting next couple of days

Busy couple of days

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T is coming up in a few hours to help with the packing. Was going to use the store van to move some tables and furniture into the condo but it has a flat tire.

Plan B

The Mediterranean Diet - an update

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Whoops - the New England Journal of Medicine paper has been retracted. From National Public Radio by way of Retraction Watch:

Errors Trigger Retraction Of Study On Mediterranean Diet's Heart Benefits
Ask just about anybody, and you'll probably hear that a healthy diet is one full of fruits and vegetables, olive oil, nuts and fish — what's called Mediterranean diet. A lot of research has suggested people who eat this way tend to be healthier, but it's been harder to prove whether that is because of the diet or some other factor.

So in 2013, many took notice of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that seemed to provide some proof. The study found that people eating the Mediterranean diet supplemented with olive oil were 30 percent less likely to experience a heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes than people assigned to a low-fat diet. People who stuck with a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts had a 28 percent lower risk than those asked to follow a low-fat diet.

The results got wide media attention, including from NPR.

But the New England Journal of Medicine retracted the paper Wednesday because of problems in the way the study was carried out.

It was a problem with the randomization of the data:

It turns out approximately 14 percent of the more than 7,400 study participants hadn't been assigned randomly to either the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one. When couples joined the study together, both had been picked to follow the same diet. At one of the 11 participating study sites, the lead investigator had assigned the same diet to an entire village and didn't tell the rest of the investigators.

Oops - a lot of work went out the window just to make things easier for the participants.

Great news from Haaretz:

World Cup 2018: Israel Wishes Saudi Arabia 'Good Luck' in Opener vs. Russia
The Israeli Foreign Ministry's official Arabic Twitter account wished Saudi Arabia good luck ahead of Thursday's opening match against Russia in World Cup 2018.

"The Saudi team is about to play the opening match in the World Cup against Russia after 12 years of absence. The team's star is Mohammad Al-Sahlawi. The Saudis suceeded in reaching the round of 16 in the 1994 World Cup. Best of luck!"

The tweet comes four days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a major Jewish gathering in Jerusalem on Sunday that Israel’s relations with Arab nations were “improving beyond imagination” and predicted that “this will ultimately help achieve peace with our Palestinians neighbors.”

Excellent news - peace with the palestinians will have to be brought about by external force. The palestinians are being controlled by the terrorist group Hamas who is funded by Iran. Make things uncomfortable enough for Iran and true peace can flourish.

Busy day - packing

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Been spending the last couple of days boxing stuff up prior to getting the farm on the market.

Breaking for the day - time for dinner.

Nice guy - Andrew Medina

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Remember him? He was the security monitor who let the Parkland school shooter walk into the building carrying a bag and did nothing - not even a radio call. Turns out he is a real piece of work - from the Deerfield Beach, FL Sun-Sentinel:

Stoneman Douglas coach kept his job after district found he sexually harassed students
A discipline committee wanted to fire Marjory Stoneman Douglas coach Andrew Medina last year for sexually harassing two students. But someone overruled them.

Instead, Medina was suspended just three days from his duties as a security monitor – a job he was working months later when he spotted Nikolas Cruz walking onto campus. Medina failed to stop Cruz, and the gunman soon killed 17 staff and students and wounded 17 more.

Among the dead was Meadow Pollack, one of the students Medina, 39, was accused of harassing in February 2017.

Rope. Tree. Some assembly required.

Immigrants - the best and brightest

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Sobering story from The Washington Times:

‘A ticking time bomb’: MS-13 threatens a middle school, warn teachers, parents, students
The boys had once been friends before MS-13 began recruiting one of them. Now, as other students streamed to class one April morning at William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale, Md., the two teens squared off in the third-story bathroom — a fight captured by another student on his cellphone.

The MS-13 recruit threw a punch at his former friend’s head. His opponent ducked and tackled the 15-year-old, their sneakers squealing as they tumbled to the green tile floor.

“I like that,” someone shouted off-camera as the recruit tried to cover his head.

But of course, there is no problem:

Although administrators deny Wirt has a gang problem, the situation inside the aging, overcrowded building has left some teachers so afraid that they refuse to be alone with their students. Many said they had repeatedly reported incidents involving suspected gang members to administrators, only to be ignored — claims supported by documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Let the cover-ups begin:

Rhonda Simley, the principal at Wirt, declined repeated requests for an interview.

“The principal is aware of concerns about gangs in the community, but has not experienced any problems in school,” John White, a spokesman for the county school system, wrote in an email.

Prince George’s police, which have an officer stationed at the school, declined to discuss the allegations of gang activity.

The last line is especially galling because:

As of May 1, police had been called to the school 74 times this school year, according to a police tally requested by The Post.

Much more at the site. The administrators aren't doing anything because that would interfere with the progressive narrative. They might actually have to do their jobs! Time for a wall and to enforce the law on people who are already here. We already have a process for people to immigrate legally, stick to that and stop the illegals. Oh yeah - William Wirt Middle School is about ten miles from The White House.

Chipping away at the bureaucracy

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One of the more egregious Obama regulations was WOTUS - it is being dialed back. From Beef Magazine:

Georgia court hands WOTUS another setback
The controversial Waters of the U.S. rule (WOTUS), implemented in 2015 by the Environmental Protection Agency  (EPA), received another setback when a U.S. District Court in Georgia issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the rule from being implemented in 13 states.

The Georgia injunction is the second time a federal court has ruled against WOTUS. The first decision came shortly after WOTUS came into effect.  A North Dakota court  issued an injunction in 2015 that prevented the rule from being implemented in 11 states. With those two court rulings in place, nearly half the country—24 states—are protected from WOTUS.

A bit more - the scope of WOTUS

Putting WOTUS in rough terms, the rule means that if a duck thinks it can land on it, any puddle is considered navigable and falls under jurisdiction of the federal government. My house in the suburbs of Denver has a small pond in the back yard that’s probably 4 or 5 feet across. Ducks have landed on it. That means, in effect, should WOTUS come into play, my back yard becomes property of the federal government.

That may be stretching things, but fortunately for me, you and everyone else, this horrendous Obama-era blunder likely will never be enforced.

A perfect example of Federal Government overreach - the Tenth Amendment should have kicked in on this one:

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Short, sweet and to the point.

Nothing much tonight

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Nothing really catches my eye tonight.

The Inspector General Report is filled with so many bureaucratic buzz-words that digging for nuggets is an exercise in futility. I hope that Congress asks for (and gets and releases) the original unredacted version.

Nothning much on YouTube either. Quiet night at the farm.

From their website:

Race to Alaska Explained
The inside passage to Alaska has been paddled by native canoes since time immemorial, sailing craft for centuries, and after someone found gold in the Klondike the route was jammed with steamboats full of prospectors elbowing each other out of the way for the promise of fortune.

It’s in the spirit of tradition, exploration, and the lawless self-reliance of the gold rush that Race to Alaska was born. R2AK is the first of its kind and North America’s longest human and wind powered race, and currently the largest cash prize for a race of its kind.

This isn’t for everyone
It’s like the Iditarod, on a boat, with a chance of drowning, being run down by a freighter, or eaten by a grizzly bear. There are squalls, killer whales, tidal currents that run upwards of 20 miles an hour, and some of the most beautiful scenery on earth.

R2AK is based on the hardest kind of simplicity
You, a boat, a starting gun. $10,000 if you finish first, a set of steak knives if you’re second. Cathartic elation if you can simply complete the course. R2AK is a self-supported race with no supply drops and no safety net. Any boat without an engine can enter.

Last year 41 teams were accepted and 27 finished.

I love the prizes - $10K for the first and a set of steak knives for the second. Great incentive. This year's race started at 5:00AM today.

Proud to be a member of this group

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From today's 568 page Inspector General Report:

  • 10:43:46, FBI Employee: “I’m very upset.”
  • 10:43:47, FBI Employee: “haha”
  • 10:51:48, FBI Attorney 2: “I am so stressed about what I could have done differently.”
  • 10:54:29, FBI Employee: “Don’t stress. None of that mattered.”
  • 10:54:31, FBI Employee: “The FBI’s influence.”
  • 10:59:36, FBI Attorney 2: “I don’t know. We broke the momentum.”
  • 11:00:03, FBI Employee: “That is not so.”
  • 11:02:22, FBI Employee: “All the people who were initially voting for her would not, and were not, swayed by any decision the FBI put out. Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS that think he will magically grant them jobs for doing nothing. They probably didn’t watch the debates, aren’t fully educated on his policies, and are stupidly wrapped up in his unmerited enthusiasm.”

Emphasis mine. Talk about clueless. More to come.

Not surprised - the place certainly has its share of idiots. From BoingBoing:

Which American cities have lowest herd immunity due to anti-vaxxers?
Parents of Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Provo, Houston, Fort Worth, Austin, Plano, Detroit, Troy, Warren, Kansas City and Pittsburgh: beware.

According to a peer reviewed study of kindergartners whose parents had opted out of vaccination, these cities are the places with the lowest herd immunity to preventable, debilitating (and potentially fatal) diseases.

Vaccinations are not 100% effective, and some people can't be vaccinated due to illness. The reason vaccination keeps our children of dying or being maimed for life by the diseases that burned through generation after generation is "herd immunity": if all the kids get immunized, then the disease can't find enough people to infect and spread.

The parents need a good whack with a clue-bat - vaccines are not harmful. The guy who first claimed a link between vaccines and autism was in the pay of an insurance company and he had is license to practice medicine revoked. His "paper" was based on a sample size of 12.

Dealership blogging

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In Bellingham getting the Highlander in for its 5,000 mile checkup.

One out of two

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Good dinner but there was no music tonight :(

Calling it quits for the day

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Been working at home boxing stuff up. Heading out for dinner and some music. 

Getting an oil change tomorrow on the new wheels. Loving the Toyota Highlander - nice ride and wonderful engineering.

From the UC Berkeley website Project IRENE

Project IRENE at UC Berkeley is a collaborative effort, funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, with team members from the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department, UC Library, Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the particle physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The project aims to use the innovative technique of non-contact optical scanning, to create digital versions of the audio recorded on the nearly 3000 wax cylinders in the Hearst Museum collection over a total of three years. 

The cylinders themselves were recorded in the field by UC Anthropologists under the direction of Alfred Kroeber between 1900 and 1940. They recorded Native Californians from many regions, and cultures speaking and singing; reciting histories, narratives and prayers, listing names for places and objects among many other things, all in a wide variety of languages. Many of the languages recorded on the cylinders have transformed, fallen out of use, or are no longer spoken at all, making this collection a unique and invaluable resource for linguists and contemporary community members hoping to learn about or revitalize languages, or retrieve important pieces of cultural heritage. 

Scholars and community members are already engaging with the collection through the California Language Archive (CLA), which facilitates restricted access to existing transfers. Though transfers already exist, they are not exhaustive, are often of poor quality and, largely, have not been made digital. This project will increase the scope and ease of access to the collection by creating digital versions of the entire collection, at higher, more easily listenable quality and turning them over to the CLA, who will provide access under appropriate restrictions.

Here is a short video of the guy involved in the project talking about the technology - very clever.

Makes sense - Arkancide

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This makes perfect sense: 

20180613-bourdain.jpg

For more info on Arkancide go here: Arkancide

Arkancide is the unfortunate habit of potential witnesses to the Clintons' dirty dealings in Arkansas suddenly deciding to shoot themselves twice in the back of the head. Police and Coroners in Arkansas, notably Fahmy Malak who answered to Governor Bill Clinton, automatically described these shootings as "suicides."

After Bill Clinton became President the phenomenon spilled over to Washington D.C. when Hillary Clinton's ex-lover Vincent Foster was "Arkancided."

Progress in North Korea

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Two items of note. From 38 North:

North Korea Razing Key Missile Test Stand
New commercial satellite imagery indicates that North Korea is razing the missile test stand at the Iha-ri Driver Training and Test Facility north of the city of Kusong in the wake of Kim Jong Un’s April statement announcing a unilateral suspension of ballistic missile and nuclear tests. The stand is the only known facility used for land-based, canister-launched ballistic missile ejection tests critical for developing the solid-propellant Pukguksong-2 (KN-15) medium-range ballistic missile and its follow-on systems. The stand could also have been used for testing larger canister-based ballistic missiles such as the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) displayed during the April 2017 military parade in Pyongyang. It is unclear whether the destruction of the stand is an indication that the North is suspending this portion of its missile program or that Pyongyang plans to erect other similar facilities in the future.

And this from Breitbart:

Trump, Kim, Bolton Featured in Massive North Korean Newspaper Spread
North Korea’s state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, dedicated its front page and its first spread Wednesday to photos and analysis of Tuesday’s meeting between dictator Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.

The photos also prominently featured American National Security Adviser John Bolton, whom various North Korean media outlets described just a few weeks ago as an “absurd” “racist” and “human scum”

North Korea’s government media, the only legal news outlets in the country, have traditionally waited days and sometimes months to publish news from abroad. Rodong Sinmun took months to mention that Kim Jong-un had agreed to meet Trump personally and published photos of Kim visiting Beijing and Dalian, China, days after Kim had returned from that trip. The relatively fast and extensive coverage in the state newspaper reflects a major change in protocol in Pyongyang.

The photos of President Donald Trump are also likely the first that many North Koreans will have seen of the American president, as state media generally avoid broadcasting any content from abroad so as to keep North Koreans from seeing how prosperous the outside world can be:

And this is really good:

Tuesday morning’s edition of Rodong Sinmun featured extensive coverage of Kim Jong-un’s tour of Singapore, including not just photos of the dictator, but Singapore’s impressive skyline and attractive nighttime vistas, an unprecedented look into the outside world for the average North Korean. Kim, the newspaper reported, “said Singapore is clean and beautiful and every building is stylish as he heard of in the past, adding he is going to learn a lot from the good knowledge and experience of Singapore in various fields in the future.”

Kim wants to join the world and President Trump offered a hand.

Censorship these days

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Glad that we have the First Amendment - not so lucky in Germany. From The Guardian:

Populist talkshows fuel rise of far right, German TV bosses told
The head of Germany’s most powerful cultural body has called for the plug to be pulled on the nation’s multitude of political talkshows for a year, arguing that their populist agenda has helped fuel the rise of the far right.

Olaf Zimmermann, who heads the German cultural council, an umbrella group for organisations from art galleries to television companies, said public broadcasters needed to step back and rethink a format that has helped cement gloom-ridden public attitudes towards refugees and Islam, and propelled the into parliament at last September’s election.

“I’d suggest for them, take a break for a year ... though the length of the intermission isn’t the decisive factor. What is crucial is that they return with new talkshow concepts and try to come up with more suitable contents with regards to social cohesion in our society,” Zimmermann said, arguing that the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF were obsessed with refugee-related issues, often framing them negatively.

Hey Mr. Zimmermann - stuff it! You progressives are all alike - ideas so good they have to be mandatory. Do you want to get people to like what you have to offer? How about offering them something they want instead of trying to cram your failing agenda and narrative down their necks.

2026 World Cup

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Barry tried but Donald delivered. From Yahoo:

U.S., Canada and Mexico win right to host 2026 World Cup
For the first time in 32 years, the men’s World Cup is coming back to North America.

FIFA’s 200-plus member associations gathered in Moscow on Wednesday and voted to award 2026 World Cup hosting rights to the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The North American bid – the product of over a decade of planning and campaigning – beat out one rival bid, Morocco’s, by a vote of 134 to 65.

And this April 2009 article at The Guardian:

Barack Obama issues support for USA 2018 World Cup bid
Barack Obama has written to the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, to signal his support for the United States' hosting of either the 2018 or 2022 World Cup. In the letter Obama also recalls his early ties to football during his time spent as a child in Indonesia.

The difference? Leadership. Nobody wants to associate with a losing team.

From All Fin:

How Can We Explain the Coming European Idiocracy?
A recent paper in PNAS by Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg reveals a significant generational drop in IQ in Norwegian male cohorts — a “reverse Flynn effect.” Other researchers have found similar results in the UK. An IQ decline of roughly 7 IQ points per generation was seen by Bratsberg & Rogeberg.

Instead of getting smarter, humans have started getting dumber.
The study by the team consisted of analyzing IQ test results from young men entering Norway’s national service (compulsory military duty) during the years 1970 to 2009. In all, 730,000 test results were accounted for. In studying the data, the researchers found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a clear reversal of test results going back approximately 70 years.  Source

Previous research from the UK had already discovered the problem:

The drop has been calculated to be between 2.5 and 4.3 points every ten years, according to two British studies.  Decline in IQ Ongoing

PNAS paper abstract:

Population intelligence quotients increased throughout the 20th century—a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect—although recent years have seen a slowdown or reversal of this trend in several countries. To distinguish between the large set of proposed explanations, we categorize hypothesized causal factors by whether they accommodate the existence of within-family Flynn effects. Using administrative register data and cognitive ability scores from military conscription data covering three decades of Norwegian birth cohorts (1962–1991), we show that the observed Flynn effect, its turning point, and subsequent decline can all be fully recovered from within-family variation. The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families.  PNAS

Much more at the site - they also talk about it in this post.

The reason explained in a movie:

Quite the trove in Iceland

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Interesting discovery - from the Reykjavík Grapevine:

Ancient Artefacts (Nearly) Lost In The Garbage In Iceland
MBL reports that the National Museum of Iceland received a peculiar phone call the other day, when they were asked to inspect a series of strange objects that had landed in one of charity shop Good Shepherd’s collection bins. The items in question, wrapped in toilet paper and placed in a plastic box, turned out to be priceless artefacts from antiquity.

Amongst the items discovered were spear points, axe heads, arrowheads and similar items, all of them obviously remarkably old.

Archeologist Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson was amongst those who saw these objects on the news when the story was first reported. By his estimation, they are actually far older than the Dark Ages estimation that reporters were bandying about. Writing on his blog on the matter, he believes that the spear heads, for example, likely date to the time of Christ, or possibly even older.

But the story gets even weirder.

The artifacts are now at the National Museum of Iceland - just wow!

A small cottage in the country

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Ran into this listing - about 20 miles away: 776 H Street Rd, Lynden, WA 98264

Bachman Manor was built in 1975 by Randy Bachman of the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive as a weekend retreat. The home was used as a recording studio for Randy and guests such as Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys, & members of the Beatles. The gated property has additional outbuildings equipped with an 8+ car garage, bowling alley & basketball court, along with a small lake at the front entrance of the nearly 30-acre property. Extensive renovations throughout have fully restored this historical home.

Just shy of 15,000 sq. ft. - the recording studio space is really nice but the asking price is a bit steep for my blood. Maybe in another life...

About that Trump

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Looks like the Democrats are being as petty as usual - from The Hill:

Dems rip Trump concessions, 'embarrassing' rhetoric with Kim
Democrats are calling President Trump's praise of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "embarrassing" while criticizing him for offering concessions in exchange of vague promises from Pyongyang.

“In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a scathing statement.

She said Trump had handed Kim concessions in return for “vague promises” and no “clear and comprehensive pathway to denuclearization and non-proliferation.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) also ripped Trump, saying on the Senate floor that the U.S. has “legitimized a brutal dictator.”

“It is worrisome, very worrisome that this joint statement is so imprecise,” Schumer said. “What the U.S. has gained is vague and unverifiable at best. What North Korea has gained, however, is tangible and lasting ... We've legitimized a brutal dictator who's starved his own people," Schumer said.

The article continue citing other democratic Senators and Representatives. Disgusting. President Obama could have done this - brought North Korea to the negotiating table - but he did not have the leadership ability. When they don't get their way, they are pitiful.

Russian meddling

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Heh - from Bloomberg:

Russia Keeps Meddling, Mueller Says in Bid to Guard Evidence
U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russian intelligence services still have active “interference operations” into U.S. elections and that handing over certain evidence in a criminal case could imperil ongoing investigations.

In other words, he has nothing, he never had anything and this is just a manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome. If he hands over his "evidence" we will all see that this was a shadow operation. He is slow-walking this in the faint hopes that the Democrats take Congress back this fall. If this happens (very remote), the investigation will gradually fade away and we will never hear anything more.

A great tweet from Assocaited Press

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You read that correctly - a misspelled name and a parody of the real Associated Press news service. The tweet has since been taken down but Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man grabbed a copy:

20180612-ap-korea.jpg

I wish!

From The Washington Free Beacon:

Claire McCaskill’s Private Plane Used on Campaign’s RV Tour Through Missouri
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) said her campaign was "hitting the road" in an RV to tour the state, but public flight information indicates that travel also occurred on her million-dollar private plane.

The RV, named BigBlue by the campaign, was unveiled late last month by McCaskill, who said she was "very excited to hit the road" in it for an upcoming "Veterans for Claire" tour. The campaign kept a live blog of its three-day RV trip from May 29 to May 31, posting updates of its whereabouts.

She wants to keep the use of her private airplane secret:

McCaskill has taken steps to hide the use of her plane. In a 2017 email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the senator asked the Federal Aviation Administration to block radar tracking information on her plane from being publicly broadcast on the internet. The request blocks the ability to track her plane on websites such as FlightAware.com.

But... There are other data sources

Websites such as ADS-B Exchange, however, use a different type of data transmission to make tracking information available to the public. Community members of the crowd-sourced website upload the ADS-B information broadcast by the plane and upload it straight into the site's free database, which can in turn be used to track planes such as McCaskill's.

The Free Beacon compares this data with the daily blog of the RV and finds that they match up. She was flying to each stop and letting her minions ride the bus - they were keeping this quiet. Another elitest big-government hack.

Back to work

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Doing a big push to get the farmhouse packed up and on the market. Anybody want to buy a nice 30 acre farm?

Broke for lunch but time to get back to work.

Great news from Singapore

Meanwhile, back at the office

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From Axios:

Scoop: Kushner to visit Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for peace plan talks
President Trump's Middle East peace team, senior adviser Jared Kushner and special envoy Jason Greenblatt, will travel to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia next week to discuss the next stages of the peace effort and the crisis in Gaza, a senior U.S. official tells me.

Why it matters: The official said Kushner and Greenblatt want to discuss lingering questions they have as they finish drafting the peace plan, including the optimal time for launching it. The U.S. official added the trip may include other stops as well, but does not include a meeting with Palestinian officials — who are refusing to meet following Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

From the U.S. official:

    • "The peace team didn’t ask for a meeting [with the Palestinians] for this trip. The Palestinian leadership will know Kushner and Greenblatt are in the region and if the Palestinian leadership wants to meet, Kushner and Greenblatt are ready to meet."
    • "The administration wants to launch the plan when the circumstances are right, and Kushner and Greenblatt want to hear the parties’ thoughts on that. The administration has not set a date yet for launching the plan."

I love that the "palestinians" are not being invited to the table. When they act responsibly, they will be given a seat at the adult's table. Until then...

Support from unlikely places! Clinton here. Today, from Vermont Biz:

Sanders statement on Trump-Kim summit
"While very light on substance, the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore represents a positive step in de-escalating tensions between our countries, addressing the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and moving toward a more peaceful future. Congress has an important role to play in making sure this is a meaningful and serious process and not just a series of photo ops."

The next couple of years will be interesting to say the least...

Nothing much tonight

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Great news out of Singapore but other sources are covering that. Liking the way that President Trump handled the G-7 too - it is irrelevant and needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Looking at a full couple of days so getting an early bedtime - a bit of YouTube and then lights out.

At PBS no less:

Bill Clinton says America should be rooting for Trump’s success on North Korea
Americans should “be rooting” for President Donald Trump at next week’s U.S.-North Korea summit on denuclearization, former President Bill Clinton said Thursday.

“I think we should be rooting for [Trump] to succeed with the North Korea negotiations,” Clinton said in an interview with PBS NewsHour managing editor and anchor Judy Woodruff.

At heart, President Clinton is a realist who sees the writing on the wall. He was able to triangulate very well when the Republicans took control of Congress (here and here). ANY of the recent Presidents could have done this - it was President Trump who held to his promise and actually made it happen. This only shows how hollow the Clinton, Bush and Obama legacies are.

Up to the farm

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Coffee - check!

Post Office - check!

Next - drive up to the farm for a few days and pack.

61 years ago - a quote

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“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed."

---Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

And that is it for the night

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Falling down the YouTube rabbit-hole. Full day tomorrow so an early bedtime.

Trailer - directed by Peter Jackson:

No word as to how good the plot is but it looks to be a grand visual epic. Website here: Mortal Engines

Livin' the island life

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On island tonight - heading to the farm tomorrow for another intensive round of packing and getting the place on the market.

Clever fire-fighting robot

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Meet the Dragon Fire Fighting robot:

One of the designs for the Tough Robotics Challenge at Tadohoku University. From their website:

In recent years, large scale disasters have occurred frequently. Application of robot technologies to improving disaster response, recovery, preparedness and mitigation capabilities, improving efficiency, and at the same time ensuring the safety of responders is an urgent issue. However, current robots are delicate goody-goodies that cannot show the same performance of work in the extreme environment of disasters as they can indoors. Their ability to respond to unexpected situations is low.

This is unreal - from the Tampa Bay Times:

Adam Putnam’s office stopped concealed weapons background checks for a year because it couldn’t log in
For more than a year, the state of Florida failed to conduct national background checks on tens of thousands of applications for concealed weapons permits, potentially allowing drug addicts or people with a mental illness to carry firearms in public.

A previously unreported Office of Inspector General investigation found that in February 2016 the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services stopped using a FBI crime database called the National Instant Criminal Background Check System that ensures applicants who want to carry a gun do not have a disqualifying history in other states.

The employee in charge of the background checks could not log into the system, the investigator learned. The problem went unresolved until discovered by another worker in March 2017 — meaning that for more than a year applications got approved without the required background check.

That kind of incompetence is criminal. All the clerk had to do was ask for the username and password.

Artificial Intelligence and the military

From Reuters:

Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles
The U.S. military is increasing spending on a secret research effort to use artificial intelligence to help anticipate the launch of a nuclear-capable missile, as well as track and target mobile launchers in North Korea and elsewhere.

The effort has gone largely unreported, and the few publicly available details about it are buried under a layer of near impenetrable jargon in the latest Pentagon budget. But U.S. officials familiar with the research told Reuters there are multiple classified programs now under way to explore how to develop AI-driven systems to better protect the United States against a potential nuclear missile strike.

If the research is successful, such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch, according to more than half a dozen sources. The sources included U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research is classified.

Curious...

To be taken with a grain of salt but... From Dangerous:

EXCLUSIVE: Vegas Shooter’s Bank Account Had Been Seized for Terror-Financing, New Docs Reveal
Five days after the Las Vegas shooting, police officials and the FBI were aware that one of Stephen Paddock’s bank accounts had been shut down over concerns it was connected to international terrorism.

On pages 85 and 86 of an official police report regarding the Oct. 1 massacre, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officer Andre Bates, working with the Department of Homeland Security, wrote on Oct. 6 that investigators became aware of Paddock’s bank account being shut down on the basis of suspicion of terrorism.

With “all of the high money withdrawals, they felt it was terrorist related,” the report states regarding the bank’s decision to close the account. It is unclear when the account was shut down, but it occurred sometime before the attack.

A lot more at the site with links to corroborating evidence. Will we ever know the truth?

Two wonderful headlines

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Forty years ago yesterday, Intel released the 8086 CPU chip and the world shifted on its axis - from Extreme Tech:

Happy 40th Anniversary to the Original Intel 8086 and the x86 Architecture
Forty years ago today, Intel launched the original 8086 microprocessor — the grandfather of every x86 CPU ever built, including the ones we use now. This, it must be noted, is more or less the opposite outcome of what everyone expected at the time, including Intel.

According to Stephen P. Morse, who led the 8086 development effort, the new CPU “was intended to be short-lived and not have any successors.” Intel’s original goal with the 8086 was to improve overall performance relative to previous products while retaining source compatibility with earlier products (meaning assembly language for the 8008, 8080, or 8085 could be run on the 8086 after being recompiled). It offered faster overall performance than the 8080 or 8085 and could address up to 1MB of RAM (the 8085 topped out at 64KB). It contained eight 16-bit registers, which is where the x86 abbreviation comes from in the first place, and was originally offered at a clock speed of 5MHz (later versions were clocked as high as 10MHz).

Morse had experience in software as well as hardware and, as this  historical retrospective makes clear, made decisions intended to make it easy to maintain backwards compatibility with earlier Intel products. He even notes that had he known he was inventing an architecture that would power computing for the next 40 years, he would’ve done some things differently, including using a symmetric register structure and avoiding segmented addressing. Initially, the 8086 was intended to be a stopgap product while Intel worked feverishly to finish its real next-generation microprocessor — the iAPX 432, Intel’s first 32-bit microprocessor. When sales of the 8086 began to slip in 1979, Intel made the decision to launch a massive marketing operation around the chip, dubbed Operation Crush. The goal? Drive adoption of the 8086 over and above competing products made by Motorola and Zilog (the latter founded by former Intel employees, including Federico Faggin, lead architect on the first microprocessor, Intel’s 4004). Project Crush was quite successful and is credited with spurring IBM to adopt the 8088 (a cut-down 8086 with an 8-bit bus) for the first IBM PC.

One might expect, given the x86 architecture’s historic domination of the computing industry, that the chip that launched the revolution would have been a towering achievement or quantum leap above the competition. The truth is more prosaic. The 8086 was a solid CPU core built by intelligent architects backed up by a strong marketing campaign. The computer revolution it helped to launch, on the other hand, transformed the world.

The segmented architecture made a lot of early adapters want to segment some of the design engineers. When programming in a higher-level language, this was not a problem as the compiler took care of this for you but when you wanted to optimize some code and write it in assembly, it was all kinds of fun. Still, it was a powerful instruction set, reasonably fast and very cheap.

It has been a great ride and still looking forward!

And the roll-up begins

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Starting to roll up the deep state, one a**hole at a time. From the Washington Examiner:

Former Senate Intelligence Committee director of security indicted, arrested for lying to FBI about leaks to reporters
Jim Wolfe, a longtime former director of security at the Senate Intelligence Committee, was indicted and arrested Thursday night for giving false statements to FBI agents during their investigation into leaks of classified information to the media.

According to the Department of Justice, Wolfe lied to FBI agents back in 2017 "about his repeated contacts with three reporters, including through his use of encrypted messaging applications."

Wolfe is also accused of making false statements about providing "non-public information related to matters occurring before the [Senate Intelligence Committee]" to two additional reporters.

One down, 700,000 to go.

RIP - Anthony Bourdain

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From CNN:

CNN's Anthony Bourdain dead at 61
Anthony Bourdain, the gifted chef, storyteller and writer who took TV viewers around the world to explore culture, cuisine and the human condition for nearly two decades, has died. He was 61.

CNN confirmed Bourdain's death on Friday and said the cause of death was suicide.

Bourdain was in France working on an upcoming episode of his award-winning CNN series, "Parts Unknown." His close friend Eric Ripert, the French chef, found Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room Friday morning.

Crap - the guy could write and was a fun personality on the air. He will be missed.

See what the YouTube faeries brought. Early bedtime - work here tomorrow and then Seattle.

Busy day today

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I had been ignoring the lawn of our island home and today, I took care of it. String trimmer, lawn mower and blower. Looks a bit ragged but a lot better than yesterday and sucessive trims with the mower will get it in shape in a month.

Very sore - took some aspirin and went out for a burger and two nice beers at a local restaurant. Probably have a glass of wine or two later tonight. Good anesthesia.

Heh - from The Daily Caller:

SHE COULD BECOME THE FIRST NATIVE AMERICAN CONGRESSWOMAN — NOW EVERYONE’S MAKING THE SAME JOKE
Deb Haaland is one step closer to becoming the first Native American congresswoman in U.S. history. She won her New Mexico primary Tuesday night in a district that leans blue and is currently held by a retiring Democrat.

In an interview with ABC, Haaland said, “In 230 years, there’s never been a Native American woman in Congress. I have never seen myself in that body of our government. Ten years ago, when I was out in Indian country knocking on doors and driving folks to the polls, I never thought I would run for Congress.”

Haaland is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna Native American tribe and both her parents are veterans. Her father is buried in Arlington cemetery.

When Haaland’s victory was announced, however, commenters on Twitter could not help themselves but poke fun at another “Native American” congresswoman, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren infamously claimed Native American heritage on numerous college applications. When confronted over proof of the claim, she said her family has “high cheekbones, like all of the Indians do.”

Warren is a fake. She could not get into Harvard Law based on her scholarship so she lied about her ancestry and got in through the diversity program. All Hail Diversity.

The Iran "Deal"

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We imposed incredible sanctions against them. NOT! From Associated Press:

Secret Obama-era permit let Iran convert funds to dollars
After striking an elusive nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration found itself in a quandary in early 2016: Iran had been promised access to its long-frozen overseas reserves, including $5.7 billion stuck in an Omani bank.

To spend it, Iran wanted to convert the money into U.S. dollars and then euros, but top U.S. officials had repeatedly promised Congress that Iran would never gain access to America’s financial system.

Those assurances notwithstanding, the Obama administration secretly issued a license to let Iran sidestep U.S. sanctions for the brief moment required to convert the funds through an American bank, an investigation by Senate Republicans released Wednesday showed. The plan failed when two U.S. banks refused to participate.

Yet two years later, the revelation is re-igniting the bitter debate over the nuclear deal and whether former President Barack Obama was too eager to grant concessions to Tehran.

“The Obama administration misled the American people and Congress because they were desperate to get a deal with Iran,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who chairs the Senate panel that conducted the investigation.

Kerry and Obama did this. If this were a normal world, they would both be serving time in jail.

A movie review

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Rex Reed at his best - from The Observer:

What Made Jodie Foster Agree to Star in the Worst Movie of the Year?
There are bad movies everywhere. And then there is 97 minutes of total garbage called Hotel Artemis. This shoddy, gross, cruel and nauseating freak show is the work of Drew Pearce, a writer of no discernible talent (Iron Men 3, Mission Impossible—Rogue Nation), making an atrocious directing debut. Moronic drivel that truly qualifies as the worst movie of the year, it sinks amateurish moviemaking aimed at audiences with no taste to an alarming new low.

The remaining seven paragraphs are just as fun to read. The premise could have been interesting but the trailer makes me yawn.

An interesting bit of information - from Science Alert:

A Crucial Archaeological Dating Tool Is Wrong, And It Could Change History as We Know It
One of the most important dating tools used in archaeology may sometimes give misleading data, new study shows - and it could change whole historical timelines as a result.

The discrepancy is due to significant fluctuations in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and it could force scientists to rethink how they use ancient organic remains to measure the passing of time.

A comparison of radiocarbon ages across the Northern Hemisphere suggests we might have been a little too hasty in assuming how the isotope - also known as radiocarbon - diffuses, potentially shaking up controversial conversations on the timing of events in history.

The ratio between C12 (stable) and C14 (radioactive) is not fixed - it varies. Oopsie!

Great news - drug bust

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Getting some goblins off the street. From The Seattle Times:

Dozens arrested in five-county drug bust in Puget Sound area
More than 35 members of what authorities called a major drug-trafficking ring were arrested Wednesday in a series of raids in King, Pierce, Snohomish, Skagit and Thurston counties, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The ring allegedly trafficked in cocaine, heroin, oxycodone, illegal marijuana and fentanyl, according to a news release. During the Wednesday operation detectives seized 12 pounds of heroin, more than two kilos of cocaine, a pound of methamphetamine, 124 pounds of marijuana, 41 firearms and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, the news release said.

During the investigation, authorities used wiretaps and heard conspirators talk about shootings, including the Sept. 4 shooting outside a Renton hookah lounge that wounded at least two people.

It was the fourth bust in the past four months in which local and federal law enforcement targeted drug-trafficking in the Seattle area.

Emphasis mine - good! Roll the gangs up - make it not profitible to operate in this area. No mention of nation of origin for these mokes but I am betting they were not born in Seattle...

Poor Maxine Waters

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This moment of schadenfreude brought to you by The London Daily Mail:

Maxine Waters plays to empty seats as only 11 millennials show up to campaign event
Young people have stayed away in droves from a tweet-a-thon with their ‘fearless champion Auntie Maxine’ in an embarrassing snub to the so-called ‘influencer’.

Maxine Waters, 79, organised a ‘Meet & Greet Tweet-a-thon’ in an attempt to show how popular, and in touch she is with millennials.

The event was billed as a ‘coming together to amplify congresswoman Walters’ voice and highlight her ‘many achievements throughout her career’.

And the attendence?

But it was a lonely-looking Waters taking to the microphone at Sunday’s event, as a video posted on her Twitter account showed just 11 millennials in attendance.

Heh - clueless and out of touch. Maxine? Your fifteen are over, time to go home and play with your grandkids.

Points South

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Down to the island for a few days of work and then Seattle for the weekend.

More later

Where are they now?

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Did not realize that this migration has been so pervasive. No wonder the media is not to be trusted. From The Last Refuge:

Former DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Officials Positioning For Devastating IG Report…
Many people have noted the bizarre number of former Obama Administration DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community officials who have gone to work within the U.S. media apparatus in order to protect their interests.

Former CIA Director John Brennan now working for NBC; former DNI James Clapper now working for CNN; former FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker now working for Lawfare blog; former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Josh Campbell now working for CNN; former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes now working for MSNBC…. the list goes on. All motives transparently political.

A bit more:

What we are now witnessing is something far beyond Pravda and Baghdad Bob. What we now see is an even more severe distortion of media; an alternate reality created as if the Stasi and Tokyo Rose joined forces to take control of U.S. broadcasts.

If the head of the KGB was an analyst for Russia Today, people would laugh. The New York Times would continue pointing at the example as a reason never to believe the stories. Yet, identically, former CIA Director John Brennan is on TV daily and almost no-one gives it a second thought.

A surreal distortion of reality, hence Kafkaesque.

Absolutely - my trust in these organizations is minimal.

Keeping fingers crossed - GitHub

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I work with a lot of open source software - these are applications developed by teams of volunteers who publish not only their programs but also the source code for these programs inviting anyone to make additions, changes or improvements. These files are kept in a repository accessable by the general public - the biggest and best of which is GitHub. They offer this service for free, making their money by hosting the same service for businesses for internal file storage. They recently celebrated their 10th anniversary.

From Microsoft:

Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion
REDMOND, Wash. — June 4, 2018 — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform where more than 28 million developers learn, share and collaborate to create the future. Together, the two companies will empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.

“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. Subject to customary closing conditions and completion of regulatory review, the acquisition is expected to close by the end of the calendar year.

GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will assume the role of GitHub CEO. GitHub’s current CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, to work on strategic software initiatives.

If MSFT can keep their mitts off GitHub and let it continue to run as it does, this will be wonderful. I hope they have the wisdom to do so.

Unlikely compatriots

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This would be fun to see - from the New York Post:

Dennis Rodman will be in Singapore for Trump-Kim summit
NBA star turned Kim Jong Un soulmate Dennis Rodman will be in Singapore during President Trump’s summit with the North Korean dictator next week, The Post has learned.

“The Worm” will arrive in the country a day before the June 12 sitdown — and sources said he could even play some sort of role in the negotiations.

The two are actually bestest buddies - Rodman has traveled to N Korea five times.

From CBS:

Secret Service arrests White House contractor with outstanding attempted murder warrant
The Secret Service arrested a contractor outside the White House on Tuesday for an outstanding warrant that includes an attempted murder charge, CBS News Washington correspondent Paula Reid reports.

A spokesperson for the sheriff's department of Prince George's Country, Maryland, told CBS News that the department had an outstanding warrant for a person by the name of Martese M. Edwards, on an attempted first-degree murder charge, dated May 17.

The Secret Service issued the following statement to CBS News:

"On June 4, 2018, the U.S. Secret Service was notified by the Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) that Martese Edwards was the subject of a warrant issued out of Prince Georges County, MD. On June 5, 2018, Edwards was promptly arrested by Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers at a checkpoint outside of the White House complex when he was reporting to work as a contractor. Edwards was transported to MPD Second District for processing."

The Associated Press said the Secret Service didn't provide Edwards' exact job or where he worked at the White House. It wasn't immediately clear if he has a lawyer.

Close call.

Privation in rural America

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Internet ws down all morning!  The horrors!

Fun times in Vancouver - SIGGRAPH

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Special Interest Group - Graphics. Meets every year and highlights the developments in computer graphics. Some amazing stuff - here is a short brag reel:

A tectonic shift

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Why should less than 4% of our population dictate how the other 96% lives their lives. From Reuters:

U.S. Supreme Court backs Christian baker who spurned gay couple
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory on narrow grounds to a Colorado Christian baker who refused for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, stopping short of setting a major precedent allowing people to claim exemptions from anti-discrimination laws based on religious beliefs.

The justices, in a 7-2 decision, said the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed an impermissible hostility toward religion when it found that baker Jack Phillips violated the state's anti-discrimination law by rebuffing gay couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig in 2012. The state law bars businesses from refusing service based on race, sex, marital status or sexual orientation.

The ruling concluded that the commission violated Phillips' religious rights under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

What gets me is that this couple went screaming to their lawyers instead of just moving on and finding another baker. That is not how I live my life - if I have a disagreement with anyone, I will talk about it if they are sincerely interested and open and otherwise, I will STFU and continue with my life. David and Charlie give all the other flaming fa**ots out there a bad name. All about meeeeeeeee...

Feeling a bit tired - not sleepy yet but see what is new on YouTube for a while.

All over but the photo op. Don Surber looks at this article and reads between the lines:

Kim fires his generals
Less than 10 days before his summit with President Donald John Trump, Kim Jong Un has fired his top three military men, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

Folks, I smell a surrender.

Reuters reported that they were hawks who oppose the denuclearization of North Korea.

"All of the newly promoted officials are younger than their predecessors, according to Yonhap, especially Ri Yong Gil, 63, who is 21 years younger than Ri Myong Su," Reuters reported.

There is a meme out there. It shows a jubilant Kim embracing a general. The caption says: "Dude, we're getting a McDonald's."

Don is one of those old-school journalists who are too far and few between these days. He actually does his homework and is able to make a decent analysis of a given situation. Don's take:

Kim wants to live in a normal country.

His father sent him to school in Switzerland, where he enjoyed an odd freedom even though the school had strict discipline.

Then as an adult, Kim returned home to a country that is crappy. It is a land of Stalinist skyscrapers with starving people. He is idolized, but trapped living in the worse country on Earth.

Trump can offer Kim normal. Kim's biggest threat is China. His land is China's puppet. Trump said cut the strings, and I'll protect you. Trump knows China cannot do a damned thing. Chairman Xi's regime survives because it has a billion-dollars-a-day trade surplus with the USA. No way he can risk that over a bunch of Korean nobodies.

Makes perfect sense to me - China and Russia are pissed. So are the Democrats. Screw them. MAGA and take North Korea (and South Korea) along for the ride. We are seeing the wakening of an economic powerhouse.

On the island

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Had dinner (Mexican) and now sitting down to surf for a bit. Planning on attacking a very overgrown lawn tomorrow - we bought an electric string trimmer so will see how it goes. The new Lithium Ion battery technology is pretty wonderful.

Off to the farm tomorrow.

Out for the day

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T and I are going out to this event: 61st Annual Sidewalk Sale to walk around and do some people watching and then I will be heading North. No posting until later this evening.

Gun grabbing in California

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You read about something like this and still deny that the liberals are tyrants? From Bakersfield, CA station KGET:

Member of prominent farming family faces felony weapons charges
The District Attorney's office filed a dozen felony gun charges Thursday against a member of a prominent farming family.

According to court documents, the California Department of Justice raided Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann's home last month, after he tried to register an illegally modified gun online through the state's website.

What they found in his home, led to the DA filing charges: a dozen guns, 230 rounds of ammunition and two silencers seized from Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann's home in a gated community in Northwest Bakersfield.

230 rounds of ammunition is peanuts. I can go through that much in a day or two at a firing range. Unfortunately, private ownership of a silencer is not legal in California (legal in 42, illegal in 10). A bit more:

The businessman was attempting to comply with California’s ever-tightening gun laws, one of which required gun owners to register “assault-style weapons” by the end of June.

He electronically submitted photographs of his AR-15 as part of the registration process, and soon became the focus of a California Department of Justice investigation.

According to court documents, the weapon was “illegally modified,” and served as grounds for the Department of Justice (DoJ) to raid Kirschenmann’s home.

It's not immediately clear what the illegal modification was, but the rifle was presumably not in compliance with the recent bans

So he tried to comply and got his house raided and his guns confiscated. The state (in general, not specifically California) is trying to amass as much central power as possible - this is the road to tyranny and needs to be stopped.

You might think that he should not have registered those guns that were modified but if he purchased them legally (99.999% of transactions), there would already be a paper trail with the ATF form 4473 and the state would have caught up with him at some time.

To the island and then the farm

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Heading to points North this afternoon - the island where I take care of a very overgrown lawn and then to the farm to continue packing stuff up and moving it to the condo. I hate moving but the end result will be delightful. Haven't been this happy in a long long time...

Nothing much on the internet

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T and I went shopping for a string trimmer and some other yard tools. Surfing the web and nothing much happening out there.

The Trump spying scandal

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More information is coming out. From John Soloman writing at The Hill:

London ‘bridges’ falling down: Curious origins of FBI’s Trump-Russia probe
The bridge to the Russia investigation wasn’t erected in Moscow during the summer of the 2016 election.

It originated earlier, 1,700 miles away in London, where foreign figures contacted Trump campaign advisers and provided the FBI with hearsay allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, bureau documents and interviews of government insiders reveal. These contacts in spring 2016 — some from trusted intelligence sources, others from Hillary Clinton supporters — occurred well before FBI headquarters authorized an official counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.

The new timeline makes one wonder: Did the FBI follow its rules governing informants?

John ties a lot of the loose ends together. Obama knew about the investigation and may have been running it. This is going to be an interesting six months...

Enacted in 1996, it is now being used to great effect. From The Weekly Standard:

Congressional Republicans’ Secret Weapon
Democrats are expecting a landslide in the midterm elections, and it’s lulled them to sleep on Capitol Hill. A case in point: Republicans have been using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to wipe out Obama-era regulations since the Trump presidency began. And Democrats, responding groggily, have just gotten around to doing something about it.

What they’re doing doesn’t amount to much. In mid-May, senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.) introduced a bill to kill the CRA. There was no fanfare or excitement, and no angry vows of resistance.

As important as it is, the CRA doesn’t command media attention, much less public acclaim. It was enacted in 1996 when Newt Gingrich was House speaker. And until January 2017, when Republicans achieved a Washington trifecta—control of the White House, Senate, and House—it had been invoked successfully only once. That was in 2001 when it ended the life of the Labor Department’s oppressive ergonomics policy.

A bit more - the CRA has somewhat limited powers but it has some major advantages as well:

The day after Trump won, House and Senate Republicans, mainly aides of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul Ryan, began conspiring with Trump aides. The CRA was now on the agenda, right near the top. And there were plenty of regulations to target.

How does it work? The CRA allows Congress to look back at regulations adopted in the dying days of a president’s tenure and, if it so chooses, vote them down. In effect, this requires one party to be in control. And they better be Republicans. Democrats adore regulation.

There are limits on CRA power. The act applies only to rules and regulations put into effect in the prior 60 legislative days.

But it has significant advantages. To kill a regulation, only a simple majority is needed. So filibusters are of no use. And a CRA vote is an official act of Congress, though the regulation under review is not. Reversing a CRA vote would take congressional action. A presidential order—Obama’s favorite way to govern—wouldn’t do the job.

Just wonderful - get rid of the regulations. We have too many - it is where we cannot understand all of them.

Those cowards should be fired. From the Miami Herald:

Paramedics wanted to enter Parkland school where kids were dying. BSO said no.
During the chaos of the Parkland school shooting, paramedics from Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department were desperate to go inside the building where students were wounded and dying.

Michael McNally, deputy chief for Coral Springs fire-rescue, asked six times for permission to send in specialized teams of police officers and paramedics, according to an incident report he filed after the Feb. 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that left 17 people dead.

But every time McNally asked to deploy the two Rescue Task Force teams — each made up of three paramedics and three to four law enforcement officers — the Broward Sheriff's Office captain in charge of the scene, Jan Jordan, said no.

"The [BSO] incident commander advised me, 'She would have to check,' " McNally wrote in the report released Thursday by Coral Springs. "After several minutes, I requested once again the need to deploy RTF elements into the scene to ... initiate treatment as soon as possible. Once again, the incident commander expressed that she 'would have to check before approving this request.' "

Even after the shooter had been arrested, the answer remained the same.

A bit more:

In his report, McNally, who had been ordered to act as a liaison between Coral Springs fire command and BSO, also claimed BSO's command post was severely dysfunctional. Communication was difficult, McNally said, because he often could not locate Jordan, BSO's district commander for Parkland.

"The command post was inundated with too many people and made it impossible to establish and function," McNally wrote, echoing criticisms of the disorganization and lack of a unified command structure that plagued BSO's response to a deadly shooting at the Fort-Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport last year.

Christ on a Corn Dog - this is what you train for. I am a very low-level responder with CERT and our local WECG and ARES but I have been through ICS training. Everyone learns what their job is and they do it. ICS was developed (PDF)  to provide a clear understandable chain of command throughout the duration of an incident.

For the Broward Sherrif's Office to have not trained their staff is unconcionable.

Good news - unemployment

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued their report this morning and the numbers looks good. From The Wall Street Journal:

Unemployment Rate Falls to 18-Year Low; Solid Hiring in May
The U.S. labor market was firing on all cylinders in May: the unemployment rate fell to an 18-year low, employers added jobs at a faster pace and wages modestly improved.

The unemployment rate ticked down to a seasonally adjusted 3.8%, matching April 2000 as the lowest reading since 1969, the Labor Department said Friday. Nonfarm payrolls rose a seasonally adjusted 223,000 in May, a jump from gains from March and April. Average hourly earnings ticked up to a 2.7% from a year earlier—and raises were even stronger for nonmanagers.

And a bit more:

The unemployment rate for women, 3.6% last month, was the lowest since 1953, when far smaller share of women sought jobs. The jobless rates for blacks, Latinos and those without high-school diplomas are trending near record lows.

President Trump is doing the job that Obama or Hillary could never do. Those people simply are unfit to govern - they are not leaders.

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